From the Sputnik to the Stack
The Seminar explored a critical account for the human's relations to his analogue and digital environment through the history of technology from the Cold War to nowdays. The soviet Sputnik, ARPA network, Stafford Beer and Salvador Allende's Cybersin, TCP/IP protocols, hackitectura's projects or the Satelliteless Movement are some of the waypoints for a conversation supported by a conceptual toolkit including Donna Haraways's cyborg manifesto, Manuel Castells's space of flows, Toyo Ito's garden of microchips, Richard Stallman's free software and William J. Mitchell's spatial extended cyborgs. Ending point is Benjamin Bratton's proposition of the Stack. Drawing on political philosophy, architectural theory and software studies, Bratton proposes that cloud platforms, smart grids, mobile apps, smart cities, automation and the Internet of Things can be seen as forming a coherent whole: an accidental megastructure that is both a computational infrastructure and a new governing architecture.
Bibliography:
Bratton, Benjamin. The Stack, On Software and Sovereignty. MIT Press, 2016.
Wark, McKenzie. The Stack to Come On Benjamin Bratton's The Stack. Public Seminar, December 28 2016. Link
Terranova, Tiziana, Red stack attack! Algorithms, capital and the automation of the common. Effemera, 2014. Link
ASSIGNMENT
As delivered to the students:
You have shortly get to know Bratton’s theory about the six layers of the Stack (Earth, Cloud, City, Address, Interface, User) that could be understood as "a new architecture”. Taking as inspiration this new theoretical model, I invite you to play with it as an speculative exploration about one of the dimensions of public space in the 21st century.
To do that, think about your studio project as the City layer in the Stack model. Then, reflect about how this layer interacts with some of the other layers: the Cloud, the Interface, the User. Use your imagination to visualise the invisible world of bits, the space of flows. You could reflect about a digital layer to your physical layer, or a digital interface for your architectural program. Get into science fiction mode and try to go beyond the app!
Then, you have four hours to deliver an image in A3 drafting this layers interaction. Think about a collage or a diagram, but feel free to choose whatever technic you want. You are invited to use one or more of the drawings done in the previous week group work as a departing point (the City layer).
RESULTS
The seminar was both a test and a challenge and the results. The students enjoyed the task and in just four working hours they did a great work. We had a nice common discussion at the end about experimental ways to approach theory.
Some of the students work include:
